We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Peterson, for one thing, has a knack for framing large topics. That is a job of a teacher (or a preacher). He offers the listener a big frame, a map, in which to fill in the details. That is something which is difficult to do on one's own without expertise.

In my career as a student, I had a couple of History teachers and profs who never set the frame: Battle of Thermopylae? What, when why, how, and why should I care? Plenty of reasons to be interested, but it wasn't told so it was disembodied information.

Peterson's hypomanic lectures teach Psychology, Anthropology, Politics, Religion, Mythology, History - they are interdisciplinary explosions. It's all from the tragic, fierce, fact-facing view of the world.

With things around now like The Great Courses, and Peterson, for examples, any curious person in the world can get a high-level university education if they want it. Cliche though it is, a formal education is just a door to further learning for those who want it.

We'll continue to post Peterson's explosions, and to urge our readers to try out some of The Great Courses as alternatives to TV.

In this piece, he focuses on IQ as a limiting factor in pursuing goals, but makes the more important point that personality factors are likely more important in life choices and career success. Unfortunately, he ignores certain factors, like passion and interest but this is just a short segment.

We initially found this through the ROKU. As you indicate the courses are very good. The Great Courses Plus is a streaming model where you pay a monthly fee, and do not buy DVD's. We prefer this model, and the costs are quite reasonable for what I get.

An ex can easily ex break up a couple marriages, wreck the kids for years or decades, and while on the arm of a fellow psychopath and multi-millionare, extol just how hard work is the panacea for life all right-minded people know it to be while she goes ta-ta-ing off.

That's one example.

Successful people generally have little capacity to 1) recognize opportunity and luck as a necessary ratio of that success, 2) forget completely that the adage about getting up one more time than you fall statistically leaves whole cohorts of the poorer side of town unable to rise to bright, rosy circumstance.

Adding debt, obligations, pensions, and derivatives - "we make money the old fashioned way. We connive it in the casino 'investment banking' system" - the US is astride a roughly quarter quadrillion dollar smoking crater of red ink. Naturally we call this hard work - which in a certain perverse irony, I suppose it was - and go on narrowly about how great we are.

Rightists are numb. Rightists have virtually no idea how the system works. If they do, they're too busy rationalizing their role in the corporatist FIRE economy to ever think to try connecting it to their vaunted ethics which is an interesting fallacy for the tribe that bellows eternally about manipulated socialist economies, as it likes to call them. And of course rightists have exactly no perspective on success that actually matches life.

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